What is Percent for Art?
Our Percent for Art team comprises two officers who are based in our Community Engagement Team and work across all areas of Bolton. Our arts officers work with residents, community groups, partners and other community stakeholders to develop socially engaged arts projects that help to improve our communities and benefit customers.
We commission appropriate artists or arts organisations, to work with the local community, and we manage the project from start to finish.
The Percent for Art service actively encourages individuals and community groups to get involved in schemes that can offer creative solutions to neighbourhood issues.
Ideas for arts projects can come from our neighbourhood teams and they will focus on specific neighbourhood priorities or be developed through conversations with community groups, partner organisations or other community stakeholders. Sometimes local arts projects are developed through wider Greater Manchester, regional or national networks or funding.
Our service also offers advice and guidance to our partners with regard to developing arts projects involving other social housing customers across Bolton. We have also been commissioned by partners to project manage a number of community arts and public / environmental art projects in Bolton.
Projects can be in any medium including visual arts, performance, music, crafts, digital art and film. They can take the form of arts based consultation, skills and confidence building projects, arts in health & wellbeing work, festivals and celebratory arts, as well as streetscaping and environmental arts projects designed to enhance the physical environment.
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2015 Manchester Day Parade
Every year since 2014 community groups supported by Bolton at Home have collaborated on Manchester Day Parade.
https://vimeo.com/131588513
In 2015 the year’s theme was ‘Game On’ and Bolton groups worked with the Percent for Art team and artist Richard Dawson to create and parade four giant animated puppet sculptures of Bolton’s sporting heroes. Johnson Fold’s Foxes of the Fold group created a giant puppet of Lisa Ashton, women’s world champion darts player; Cawdor / Campbell Action Group and New Bury residents worked on a puppet of Olympic gold medal winning cyclist Jason Kenny; residents from the Fusion Centre in Tonge Moor chose athlete Ethel Johnson who, in 1932, was one of Britain’s first female Olympians; and Breightmet’s Naughty Knitters crafted a giant puppet of Sir Philip Craven, world wheelchair basketball champion and President of the International Paralympic Committee.